Lee Blaske
Senior Member
I'd go with SampleModeling/AudioModeling trumpets, bones and french horns plus Screaming Trumpet for that, plus a reverb that gives that kind of room tone. You need to play each line in separately, unquantized.
This deserves the "Most Insightful Post" award for the year. Thanks for sharing!
This is a Snake Eater cover I did which is the theme song from Metal Gear Solid 3 (which openly nods to Bond)
Amazing work, Daniel! Snake Eater will always be my favourite non-Bond Bond song. Cynthia Harrell is great, and so is Harry G-W's score to the game.
So... a sort of on-topic/off-topic story:
I scored a movie a bit back (“Kazaam” - yes, the one featuring Shaquille O’Neil as a genie...) in London with the London Studio Orchestra - amazing players and I think essentially the LSO under a different name. Anyways, an action score but ~not~ a Bond film.
Due to the often various, shall we say, “idiosyncrasies” of scoring a film in Hollywood, the production dragged it’s feet on deciding where and when they wanted me to record the score. By the time they decided they wanted to send me to London, Abbey Road and Air were already booked with other sessions, and our scoring stage choice was left to CTS.
When I arrived at the stage the first day, I was in awe of all the classic Bond posters hanging in the Lobby; as many of those scores had been recorded there. “Cool!” I thought.
CTS was a bit of an odd room. A huge and very square sunken space, the control room was “upstairs” - one walked down a flight of stairs to get to the stage floor below - which was funny because the control room window then looked out at nothing but the back wall - you couldn’t see the orchestra at all from the console, but had to walk over to the window and look down.
Anyways, we had a big band for the sessions - something like 95+ players if I remember correctly. And as an action score, I had written some big forte brass motifs - with a big brass section to perform them. I was excited. At a stage like say, Warner Bros, this would have sounded, well, awesome.
It was the first time, on the first day, that the brass got to one of those big motifs, that I discovered an important, however accidental, clue to the Bond score “sound.” When the brass hit the first big moment, they room acoustics of the stage completely overloaded - essentially obscuring the rest of the orchestra - strings, woodwinds just vanished in the mics - and we had a lot of string players! And the characteristic “honk” of the brass - my score had instantly turned into a “Bond” score! We weren’t using mutes or stops; but the scoring stage, being a big square box, clearly had a few modal resonance peaks that were at the right frequency to accentuate brass (especially horns and bones) resonances and create “that” sound. It was both a “wow” and a total “uh-oh” moment. We spent the rest of the week re-marking all of the dynamics in the music so that the brass never played above mF and the strings had to dig in a lot more. The brass still hounded huge - just - to the degree we could even control it at all - a little less “Bond” “honky.” The takeaway was that, as always - the recording room is a huge part of the sound.
Back to the OP’s goal here, in addition to some orchestration/articulation choices - like stopped horns etc, I think you can get this sound by using whatever brass samples you have - and some creative use of filters and saturation plugins to process them. Put a filter plugin on your brass stem, reduce the top end curve of the filter a bit and dial up the resonance peak/sweep it around until you start to find ‘that’ sound. Add some subtle distortion/saturation to taste. And (though this might be a little counterintuitive) possibly feed a little of the brass to a spring reverb plug-in - as this will make it cue “vintage” aurally as well. When I was scoring Futurama I used these tricks a bunch, because often I needed the orchestra to sound old and vintage - but the LA scoring stages actually sounded themselves too “clean” and modern. I used to also stuff a mic into a trash can in the center of the orchestra and blend that recorded signal into the mix - essentially trying to mimic a “honky” and less perfect recording environment.
So... until someone finds a big resonant and funky square room and samples an orchestra in it, my suggestion is to be creative and experimental with whatever tools you have already; you might be surprised just how close you can get!
I think its pretty close XD
(ok I can think of another story but let’s save that )
THIS!This is true of ANY “ensemble” we all get to work with - live, sample library-based or otherwise - one has to learn to write to the strengths of the ensemble before you. There is just no substitute for this skill. And before we all had so many choices, we had no other choice but to be clever with what we had. As amazing as all of our sample tech is now (and it is, and I love it) I think this truth has gotten a little lost by the wayside.
Derek Watkins was the trumpet player who’s sound you are trying to replicate. He was the first call “lead style” session player in London for decades. Wayne Bergeron is the equivalent, or certainly one of them in LA at the moment and has been one of the top Lead session players in the world for some time. Sadly having heard him live, I don’t think the realitone library really does him justice.
Realitone did not record the Screaming Trumpet library. They purchased it from a company called Warp IV. Realitone resurrected a very limited and flawed product and via some nice programming made it eminently useful for the first time. I owned the original product (and now the Realitone) and the Realitone version is heads above it. But either version is unlike any other product out there.
Now... if Realitone's Mike Greene were to re-do this product by getting Wayne Bergeron (possibly the world's leading trumpet high-note specialist) back into the studio it would be a significant library.
Note: I was doing a 'Rocky' kind of cue today and happily used a combination of CSB and Realitone's Screaming Trumpet. Was there some finessing and processing going on to make them match ambiences? Yes, there was. But... if you need screaming trumpets then you must use Screaming Trumpet.
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I did a mockup of this James Bond piece for Vir2 with their MOJO 2 library a while ago.
It did pretty well:
I did a mockup of this James Bond piece for Vir2 with their MOJO 2 library a while ago.
It did pretty well:
Nice! Not sure I could pull this off but I've been looking to replace Session Horns Pro and considered Mojo2. Among other things, SHP doesn't scream; at least I can't get those sounds out of it. I need to take another look Mojo2.I did a mockup of this James Bond piece for Vir2 with their MOJO 2 library a while ago.
It did pretty well:
I think you would be right:It could be trombones and stopped horns in unison.
Ok this one is incredible! Nice job, you nailed it!!
I did a version of my own a couple years ago (shameless plug): https://m.soundcloud.com/ones_and_zeros/shaken-not-stirred
The main brass libraries that really made this happen were Sample Modeling Trumpet and Trombone 3, Chris Hein Horns Vol 2, and Session horns pro that came with Komplete. For the orchestral parts Cinebrass also was a huge help for those thick warm parts.
What Strings did you use for this, they sound really great